The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter. Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city. I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred. All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said.

Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

Since January, Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the ceasefire; it refused to withdraw its soldiers, it continued military operations (150 Palestinians were reportedly killed in Gaza during the “ceasefire”), and it blocked electricity and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza — a violation of international humanitarian law.

this week, he became the first Israeli leader to ever fire the head of Shin Bet, an intelligence agency in Israel that recently put blame on the Israeli government (and Netanyahu) for failing to act on warnings about the October 7 attack. With Netanyahu’s governing position secured and critical voices banished, the bombing started again in earnest.

while Hamas may be responsible for the horror it unleashed on Gaza with its October 7 attacks, I find it hard to dispute that — within the scope of the last two months — the primary fault for this deal collapsing lies with Israel.

The talking point from Netanyahu and Trump is simple: Hamas didn’t release the remaining hostages. But it’s also incomplete. Hamas did the most important thing it had committed to in phase one: It released all 33 hostages, as the deal called for, and came to the table to negotiate phase two.   Israel violated the agreement’s terms first by not meeting on the ceasefire’s 16th day to discuss the plans for phase two. Phase two was always going to be the sticking point, because it required an actual end to the war and Israel leaving Gaza.

Trump then began insisting on an extension of phase one, which was not in the text of the agreement. Then Israel broke the commitment to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor. Then Israel broke its promise to continue aid while second stage talks were ongoing. Then Israel broke the promise to actually cease firing. Israel did all of this before Hamas balked on additional hostage releases.

Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages to extend his political life. From the early days of the war, this has been the story; it’s why he refused to end the war earlier, and it’s how he has survived this year and a half despite his political obituary being written on October 8. Once again, it is politically advantageous for him for the war to continue. Netanyahu needs approval for a budget before March 31, which he can’t get without support from the far-right wing of his party, which wants him to do exactly what he’s doing now.

Gazans have no ability to restrain or resist Hamas, a group that cares more about killing Israelis or pretending it may have a way to win this war than it does about protecting its own people. Israelis are at the whims of a leader who consistently ignores their pleas for a ceasefire, caring only about his own political survival.

we have the leaders of Hamas holding on to all they have, which are literal human bargaining chips, and the Israeli prime minister openly defying the desires of the hostages’ families. Meanwhile, the U.S. president openly muses about permanently vacating Palestinians from Gaza

The Houthis said it would continue to target Red Sea shipping until Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza, and that its forces would respond to the strikes. The Iranian-backed rebel group, which considers Israel its enemy, controls Sanaa and the north-west of Yemen, but it is not the country's internationally recognised government. The Houthis have said they are acting in support of the Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and have claimed - often falsely - that they are targeting ships only linked to Israel, the US or the UK.

Consider this: Russia threatened "escalation" and promised attacks on NATO allies if we sent M1A1 tanks. We did, and nothing about their approach fundamentally changed. They made the same threats with HIMARs rocket launchers; again, we did, nothing changed. The Patriot Air Defense system, the cluster munitions, the F-16 fighter jets — over and over and over Ukraine has asked for support that the Biden administration has balked on giving immediately, all while Russia said "if you do this, we are really going to make you pay" — then we eventually do it and Russia doesn’t change its strategy. Is it risky to bet that Russia will continue to bluff? Of course. Do I think Russia has any interest in widening this war — including a nuclear escalation — beyond the territories in Eastern Ukraine it is now struggling to defend or capture? No. NATO involvement would be a death-knell for Putin's war, and he knows that. Instead, after 1,000 days, the U.S. should start acting confidently, with the understanding that Putin is doing more flexing than punching.

It’s possible that threats exist I don’t fully understand. But with 20/20 hindsight, if I could go back to the first week of this war, I think I would have advocated that the U.S. give Ukraine everything it wanted right away and allowed them to better defend themselves — within their borders, in the skies, and on Russian territory. What we've done instead is create exactly the kind of war of attrition Russia is built to win, spent exorbitant amounts of money on weapons, and allowed a million Ukrainians and Russians to die.

When Banks is able to establish sufficient shared vocabulary to ask why the aliens have come, they answer with a statement that could be translated as "offer weapon". China interprets this as "use weapon", prompting them to break off communications, and other nations follow. Banks argues that the symbol interpreted as "weapon" can be more abstractly related to the concepts of "means" or "tool"; China's translation likely results from interacting with the aliens using mahjong, a highly competitive game.

Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation right now, with fake accounts, straight-up lies, confident-sounding assertions based on old videos, and people who spent 20 minutes Googling about something trying to correct reporters, academics and researchers who have spent years covering Israel, Palestine, and wars of all kinds.

An explosion at a hospital is not unlike the debate that broke out about precisely how many Israeli children were beheaded or burned alive after Hamas’s attack. Journalistically, it is important for us to get this story right. Morally, the finer details are in some ways not the most relevant. This explosion, whether it was the result of an Israeli rocket or not, has still left rescue crews collecting bodies and remains in a charred parking lot. And while everyone was arguing about who to blame this incident on, Israel did bomb a school run by the United Nations, killing six people. And the situation in Gaza is increasingly desperate.

They killed over 1,500 Hamas fighters in the initial battle. They have flattened dozens of buildings in Gaza — including schools, housing, and health centers. At least 19 journalists have been killed, a sign of how wide-reaching the violence has been. Israel has, in all likelihood, killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians — and the number may already be in the thousands. They have displaced one million people. Senior Hamas leaders are being killed left and right. They’re clashing with protesters in the West Bank, where the resulting violence has also killed people. They are rallying support from allies in Europe and the United States.That is the response. A lot of the commentary assumes Israel should pursue a strategy of uprooting and destroying Hamas, which implies that what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. But as the U.S. learned in launching a full-scale attack to destroy al-Qaeda, what follows could well be worse. And as I wrote earlier this week, Israel should be careful not to repeat the same post-9/11 mistakes the U.S. made. Israel’s response has already been violent, and it’s been forceful, and it’s been severe.

The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy

The anxiety in Tel Aviv is palpable, peaceful though it seems, while Gaza is an inner ring of hell and probably on a path to something much worse.

What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?

Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. Fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.

Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.”

I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.